Archive for the 'Desire and objectification' Category

“I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted”: some thoughts on dorms, gender, and the myth that proximity creates desire

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 16, 2010
in Desire and objectification, Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Myth of Male Weakness, Roommates, Sleeping patterns and Youth
. 6 Comments

One of the things about blogging for a few years is that one regularly has the opportunity to reflect upon — and revise — old posts. Mind you, I don’t dip into my archives and surreptitiously rewrite old pieces. Rather, I sometimes find that the passage of time has given me a different perspective. It is so with an issue freshly in the news once more: mixed-sex dorm rooms.

I wrote about the subject of colleges assigning different-sex students to the same dorm room in 2006 in this post. What troubled me then was not that folks would seek out roommates of the opposite sex. What I wanted was to encourage bonding with one’s own gender. Boys who find it difficult to relate to other males; girls who’ve found relationships with other females to be characterized by competition and judgment — these were, I argued, the sort of young people who could benefit from confronting their own discomfort with living with the same sex. Rereading that post three and a half years after I wrote it, I wince at my willingness to be so prescriptive of what young people need. And while I stand by my conviction that we do need to do more to encourage some young folks to fight through their fears of bonding with those who share their biology, I’m much less willing to insist upon it.

I’m thinking about this because the Los Angeles Times, a few years late to the party, ran a front-page article yesterday on what is no longer as much of a novelty as some might imagine: Mixed-gender dorm rooms are gaining acceptance.

The number of colleges offering the option increases each year, though the total number of schools at which it is possible to room with someone of the other sex is still only about fifty. The Times profiles the situation at nearby Pitzer College (an institution to which I have seen a number of my best and brightest transfer over the years), and interviews students there and at my alma mater, Cal. (In the 1980s, the innovation at Berkeley was bathrooms shared by both sexes. After the first week, having women walk past men standing at urinals became old hat.)

What heartened me was the willingness of so many young people to separate the idea of close physical proximity from sexual intimacy. The assumption of an older generation, of course, is that the power of desire is so overwhelming that it makes uncomplicated friendship (or, simply, roommate-ship) impossible between two heterosexual young people of different genders. Read the comments after the Times story; lots of predictions of rape and distraction. The myth of male weakness raises its head in the thread over and over again.

The comment that caught my attention was this one from someone called “cmfreedom”: I guess “gender-neutral housing” means asexual. I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted! Bold is mine.

What impressed me about the young people in the article is the same thing that depressed me about cmfreedom’s remark. Our dominant cultural narrative is the discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire. We believe that men — particularly those of college-age — are so in thrall to raging hormones that they are constitutionally incapable of seeing women as anything other than sex objects. The peddlers of the discourse sneer contemptuously at those who insist that men are, in fact, are both quite capable of self-regulation and frequently not as sex-crazed as their elders believe. To claim for men the capacity to exercise control, to insist that young men do not all think about sex every seven (or sixteen, or thirty-five) seconds is to invite derision. Continue reading ‘“I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted”: some thoughts on dorms, gender, and the myth that proximity creates desire’

Discourses of desire and the problem of rejection

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 01, 2010
in Desire and objectification, Rape, aggression and violence and Sexuality
. 8 Comments

Last week, Rachel Hills guest-posted an explosive piece at Feministe: But Women Don’t Rape. Rachel began by reflecting on this post at the Feministing Community which dealt with a woman’s sudden awareness that one of her female friends had coerced her boyfriend into having sex. The comment threads at both Feministing and Feministe are substantial and well worth a read.

Rachel and her commenters note the constellation of factors that make us believe that women cannot force men into unwanted sex: our misconceptions about male physiology (the “guys can’t have erections or ejaculate against their will” myth); our belief that men are more resistant to psychological pressure and invariably less eager to people-please: our notion that, as the Feministing post put it, “nice girls” (especially feminists) simply are incapable of forcing their boyfriends to do anything against their will.

Please join the great discussion at either site. I have posted a bit on the issue of men-as-victims, as well as on the notion that pleasure is not evidence of consent. In a 2005 post about Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau I wrote:

For too many of us, pleasure and orgasm are inconsistent with (being a victim of) sexual violation. But to assume that pleasure and orgasm are always acts of volition is to defy practically everything we know about adolescent development, sexuality, and power.

I’d amend that to say that the statement holds fairly well even if we remove the “adolescent” from it.

But there’s another issue that Rachel raised at Feministe that I’d like to tackle: the way in which we socialize women to believe that they ought never be the higher-desire partner in a heterosexual relationship. She writes:

…one of the interesting threads that has come through in my interviews is how very poorly many women take it when their male partners don’t want to have sex with them. They don’t like it at all. For these women, being turned down for sex – even if only occasionally, even if only once – is read as communicating a whole lot of nasty things about them and their relationship. That their partner doesn’t find them attractive anymore, that he’s cheating, that their relationship lacks passion, that they’re bad in bed, that he’s not into women at all.

(For more on Rachel’s research and to take her survey, visit here.

I think that Rachel’s right. The male sexual desire discourse tells us that men are always in the mood, invariably hornier than women. Indeed, our whole notion about the myth of male weakness is linked to assumptions about the overwhelming power of men’s libidos. But as countless women have discovered in relationships with heterosexual men, this discourse founders on the rocks of reality. As Rachel says, many women are confused when boyfriends or husbands evince less interest in sex than they themselves do. Rather than question the discourse, many choose to blame themselves, assuming that they are insufficiently attractive. Sometimes, they externalize that self-doubt, accusing their male partners of being gay or of having an affair.

As several of the commenters have pointed out, there’s an old axiom in marital therapy: the lower-desire partner has more power than the higher-desire partner. The one who has the power to please or disappoint by saying “yes” or “no” gains the upper hand. (I’ve posted about that a couple of times. Sorry to always link to myself, but here’s a post on that subject too.). And of course, one of our most traditional (and loathsome) discourses with which we raise young women is the one that teaches that a woman’s power comes from her ability to control men sexually. Sex is a bargaining chip, and its value is created by men’s impetuous libidos.

Though most younger women today, particularly young feminists, intellectually reject the “sex as leverage” trope, the idea continues to exert an uncomfortable hold on many. Many women don’t realize the degree to which they had “bought in” to the discourse until they find themselves in relationships with men whose desire for sex is less than their own. And while it’s never easy to be rejected, and never easy to deal with sexual frustration and self-doubt, men are more insulated than women from the effects of that rejection. That doesn’t mean men are less sensitive, or less vulnerable to hurt. But a man whose sex drive is higher than his female partner’s can comfort himself that theirs is “a normal relationship.” His frustration is par for the proverbial course; his masculinity is not called into question when his girlfriend is not in the mood.

We have many inanities that pass for common wisdom about men and women and their different attitudes towards sex. We say things like “Women need a reason; men just need a place” or, when describing the speed of arousal, that “Men are lightbulbs, women are ovens”. My readers can probably think of more. And while like all cliches, they prove true in some instances, the exceptions are sufficiently numerous as to disprove the rule altogether. The problem is, of course, the effect on the many for whom the opposite of these “truisms” is true. A woman who does “feel like a lightbulb” when it comes to arousal is made to feel abnormal, as is a man who is more “like an oven.” And while these bits of common nonsense comfort “higher desire men”, reassuring them that they are normal, they suggest that all sorts of things are wrong with a woman if she finds herself more easily and frequently turned on than her boyfriend.

It is axiomatic that the fewer freedoms women have, the more their beauty is valued. Some of the most repressive societies on earth value that beauty by concealing it from all but her husband, who is entitled to possess it as he pleases: others encourage young women to display their bodies (whether they want to or not) for men’s consumption. This isn’t about burqas and bikinis again. It’s about the idea that we raise our daughters to see their beauty as a particular source of power. And while most of us would like to be found attractive, our craving to be wanted sexually is often in inverse proportion to the amount of leverage we can achieve using our other talents.

A decade into the 21st century, and many of us still believe that a woman’s desirability is among her most valuable assets. And many women who don’t think that they believe that nasty old sexist notion discover that it still has a strange hold upon them –and they discover it at the moment that they find themselves in relationships with men whose desire for sex is less than their own.

“I can make anything work”: more on desire and its absence

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 25, 2010
in Desire and objectification, Relationships and Youth
. 22 Comments

I recently got a Facebook message from a former student of mine named May, a message which opened:

Is it possible to have feelings for someone and not be physically attracted to them? Aren’t they supposed to go hand in hand?

May gave me her permission to write a response here, though I did give her a more personal one as well.

I’ve gotten this question from others before — and not just from young people. I dealt with that issue in this February 2008 post on the indispensability of passion. Writing contra the infamous Lori Gottlieb, I said

Yes, passion may fade over time. But trust me on this one: there is a world of difference between being in a marriage in which the passion has cooled and one in which there was never any “heat” to begin with. Expecting sexual heat to endure (without any increase in effort) for years is unrealistic; settling for a marriage where there isn’t even any memory of fire and passion is, I think, too great a compromise.

That was true for marriage. But what of May, still in high school, contemplating what it is that she should do about a budding relationship with a classmate?

Depending on our stance, we tend to either oversell or dismiss young women’s sexuality. It is certainly far from true that adolescent girls aren’t interested in sex, just as it is far from true that adolescent boys are interested in nothing but. But even as we resist the traditional straitjacket narratives about teenagers and desire, we do need to acknowledge that we raise our sons and daughters to experience desire differently. And we need to acknowledge something else, something that forms part of a gentle warning to May: young women often overestimate their capacity to make things work.

Anyone who works with teenagers knows that grandiosity and low self-esteem often go hand in hand. I wrote about that in a post called I have so much love to give: young women and self-flattery.

Teenage girls are renowned for their vicious self-criticism. Time and again, I’ve heard young women criticize their own appearance, their academic shortcomings, their bad habits. But those same young women will often hasten to say, if they are or have been in a relationship, “You know, I’m a pretty awesome girlfriend.” Or if they haven’t yet been in one: “I am an incredibly loving person, and I would give so much to the right guy.”

There’s a corollary to that. Some young women overestimate their capacity not only to love with great intensity, they overestimate the malleability of their own emotions. I’ve often written that to some extent, sexual identity is fluid — for both sexes. But that fluidity has its limits, and that’s something that on occasion, the young fail to understand. May hasn’t said this, but I’ve heard things like this from many of her peers: “I really like Leroy. I think I could fall in love with Leroy. I’m not physically attracted to Leroy, but he’s perfect in every other way. And you know, I think if I work at finding things about him that are desirable, I can make myself want him. And if I can’t, I think I can learn to live without that passion. I can make anything work.” Continue reading ‘“I can make anything work”: more on desire and its absence’

Tiger Woods and the “misogynistic homosocial economy” of desire

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 09, 2009
in Desire and objectification, Homosociality, Infidelity, Men and Masculinity, Race and Sexual harassment
. 100 Comments

(The title of this post differs slightly from when it was first put up this morning.)

Lots of discussion in the blogosphere these past few days about this Eugene Robinson column in the Washington Post: Tiger’s validation complex. Robinson, who is African-American, is troubled by more than the famous golfer’s equally famous multiple infidelities. He’s troubled by the type of woman that Tiger seems to have pursued:

Here’s my real question, though: What’s with the whole Barbie thing?

No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who’ve been linked to Woods resemble one another. I’m talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement.

This may be the most interesting aspect of the whole Tiger Woods story — and one of the most disappointing. He seems to have been bent on proving to himself that he could have any woman he wanted. But from the evidence, his aim wasn’t variety but some kind of validation…

…the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes — some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin. Woods appears to have bought into an “official” standard of beauty that is so conventional as to be almost oppressive.

His taste in mistresses leaves the impression of a man who is, deep down, both insecure and image-conscious — a control freak even when he’s committing “transgressions.”

There is a long and painful history in the African-American community revolving around the penchant that a great many successful black men have had for pursuing white women. Indeed, the problem (if we can name it that) is a staple of magazine articles and fiction aimed at African-American women. I’m not a commenter on race, so it’s best that I merely note that the reaction Robinson is having is connected to a bitter and complicated history that is a good deal older than the now-disgraced superstar golfer.

But there’s a part of Robinson’s piece that isn’t just about race; it’s about the way in which men of all ethnicities use certain types of women as “trophies.” It is almost axiomatic that female beauty is a commodity which men employ to boost their status with other men. I wrote about this in April 2006, in a post about men, women, homosociality and weight. An excerpt:

Men are taught to find “hot” what other men find “hot.” The whole notion of a “trophy girlfriend” is based on the reality that a great many men use female desireability to establish status with other men. And in our current cultural climate where thinness is idealized, a slender partner is almost always going to be worth more than a heavy one. For men who have not yet extricated themselves from homosocial competition, their own self-esteem and sense of intra-male status may decline in direct proportion to their girlfriend’s weight gain.

Let me stress that this is absolutely not women’s problem to solve! My goal is not to make women who gain weight feel bad; protecting a fragile male ego is not a woman’s responsibility. The key thing men need to do is get honest about their own desire to use female desireability to establish status in the eyes of other men. And here’s where pro-feminist men can do a terrific service by challenging one another and holding each other accountable for the ways in which we are tempted to use our wives and girlfriends as trophies.

“Whiteness” can function similarly to “thin-ness”, particularly for men of color. America has a long and bloody history of violence towards dark-skinned men who were even suspected of a sexual interest in white women. For some men of color, to be with a white woman — particularly one who embodies the all-American “Barbie” ideal — is to say to the world “See, I’ve made it. You can’t touch me; I’ve achieved sufficient power and wealth so that I can have ‘access’ to what was once forbidden and could have gotten my grandfather lynched.” I’m not saying that was Tiger’s motive (Robinson is, and he’s in a better position than I to do so). I am saying that bedding whiteness, in the misogynistic homosocial economy, gives status points.

One of the important challenges we all need to take up is that of separating out what aspects of our desires are organic to us, and what aspects are socially constructed and reinforced. Men who are afraid to date heavier women “because of what my buddies will say” or women who are reluctant to date shorter men “because of how we’ll look together in public” do have, I think, an obligation to distinguish their fear of losing status from their actual desires. As we all know, the human libido is flexible but not infinitely so; it can be influenced but not entirely molded by culture and experience. Most of us have preferences and types, as I wrote in 2005, that are to some degree essential to us:

…feminism is not hostile to the body, nor to human sexual responses to the body. Feminism does ask the hard questions about why our culture suggests only some kinds of bodies are worthy of being deemed attractive! Feminism is critical of the extraordinarily narrow range of women’s bodies depicted as beautiful and desirable in the culture. But there’s a difference between speaking out against the ways in which popular culture limits the definition of beauty and desire, and rejecting the idea of lust and physical attraction altogether.

Most of us — not all — have certain physical “types” to which we are often drawn…A “type” does become a problem when certain physical attributes are presumptively linked to certain anti-feminist qualities (submissiveness, docility, and so forth). Most feminists are rightly troubled, for example, by white men who have an “Asian fetish” that is clearly linked to fantasies about submission and sexuality. But a man who simply prefers brunettes, without attaching any cultural baggage to his attraction, is not violating any vital feminist principle. We are allowed our individual quirks and our individual preferences, as long as those quirks and preferences are not linked to racist and sexist assumptions that certain types of women “know how to treat a man better.”

I’d add the Tiger corollary to that, which is that individual preferences are fine insofar as they are not thinly (sorry) disguised excuses for pursuing a particular type of woman in order to gain validation and status in the real or imagined eyes of other men. Untangling what we want sexually from what we ourselves want in order to meet cultural or familial expectations is a universal challenge. Unlike my postmodernist friends, I do believe we have an identity and desires that are deeper than our culture; our sexuality, although more malleable than many imagine, isn’t entirely a tabula rasa. (If that were so, there’d be far fewer GLBT kids growing up in conservative Christian households than there in fact are.)

Part of becoming a responsible, sexually mature adult is doing the often difficult work of discerning what one craves inherently from what one has been taught one ought to crave, and what one has learned will win approval from parents or peers. It ain’t rocket science, but it isn’t easy either. And while Tiger may “organically” crave youthful white women with Barbie-esque proportions, one suspects that for all his achievements, he has not yet come close to gaining insight and understanding of the role sexuality plays in his life. And the consequences of lacking that understanding are, as we have seen in his case, devastating.

Bonding through revulsion and desire: a note on homosociality and strip clubs

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 01, 2009
in Desire and objectification, Homosociality, Sex work, Sexual harassment and Youth
. 24 Comments

A reader named Sarah recently wrote in about a conversation she had with her husband about strip clubs:

My husband today mentioned the time he took his younger brother to a strip club when the brother turned 21. I laughed a bit, and said, “wow! i never heard that story before!” A few more teasing words were said between the 3 of us, and Imentioned that if he ever took our (still non-existent) son to a strip club i’d be furious. I assumed no more needed to be said, as the whole idea of it was so ludicrous and that my husband wouldn’t do something so creepy and so anti-women with a son of ours.

My husband shocked me by saying that yes, he would take our kid to a strip club and he doesn’t see why it would matter to me if “our son is getting married, and we all go to a titty bar for the bachelor party. it’s not like i’d encourage him to cheat!” I was left sputtering and a little disturbed, and totally unsure on how to proceed with this conversation as my husband is a man who’s always respected women and agreed on these matters. (or I obviously wouldn’t have married him!)

I’m no fan of strip clubs for a host of reasons. But Sarah’s email isn’t really about strip clubs — it’s about the problem of homosociality, a topic I’ve written about many times before. (Homosociality is the notion that for American men in particular, the approval of other males is of paramount concern, even more sought after than validation from women.) One of the most odious features of homosociality is the way in which it employs women’s bodies as devices for bonding men together. For example, many women are perplexed (as well as infuriated) by the habit young (and not-so-young) men have of cat-calling female pedestrians from passing cars. “Why do they slow down and whistle at me, making those comments?” a young woman asks; “Do they really think I’m going to get in the car with them?” The answer, of course, is that the fellas in the car are far less interested in the woman they’re harassing than in bonding with each other. They demonstrate their heterosexual bona fides to each other, and in the process of humiliating women on the street, forge a closer homosocial relationship. (It’s more than anecdotal to point out that groups of men, having just harassed a woman sexually, will high-five each other; one of the most devastating depictions of this comes in the rape scene from “Boys Don’t Cry”.)

Going to a strip club, of course, isn’t necessarily analogous to participating in a gang rape. But fathers and older brothers have been taking their sons and younger brothers to “titty bars” and brothels for a long time; in parts of Latin America, the practice is particularly common. The stated purpose may be an “initation into manhood” for a teen boy, or a bacchanalian farewell to bachelorhood for a man about to be wed. But there’s invariably more to it than that. Wives and girlfriends, not unreasonably, suspect that the motive is sexual: fathers and brothers may claim to be doing it as a favor for a son or a sibling, but in reality they’re just looking for an opportunity for “justified infidelity” of one kind or another. That may be true, but there’s a deeper and more common reason: a longing for homosocial intimacy.

Going to a baseball game is the paradigmatic “father-son” bonding activity. But for many men, sporting events are less effective than strip clubs as homosocial strategies. Women haven’t been excluded as spectator from ball parks for generations; very few wives and mothers actively disapprove of sports. (They may find watching sports dull, but that’s hardly the same.) Men in our society, as countless scholars of gender have pointed out, are socialized to find particular delight and meaning in activities from which women are excluded, or which most women find repugnant and objectionable. American boys prove their manhood, after all, through their rejection of their mothers’ values; to care too deeply about what mom thinks is to be a sissy, a mama’s boy. And need I point out how many American men have relationships with wives and girlfriends that closely resemble the mother-son dynamic? Mama might not object to taking little brother to the Yankees game — but she’s likely to be less pleased with a sojourn to the titty bar down the block.

The effectiveness of strip clubs as a homosocial bonding strategy is thus linked to two things: the shared sense the male patrons have that their wives and mothers disapprove of their being there, and the opportunity to establish their credentials as “red-blooded, straight American guys” by sharing the experience of objectifying women’s bodies. A single man in a strip club, nursing a beer, is seen as a vaguely pathetic — or perhaps threatening — figure; a group of men on a “stag night” in that same club are anything but. What is unacceptable in solitude is admirable and manly when done in solidarity with other males.

For men who, perhaps like Sarah’s husband, who have not yet done the vital work of learning how to establish intimate relationships with other men which do not require the objectification of women as “bonding glue”, the homosocial appeal of the strip club experience is tremendous. But women aren’t cement to hold together that which can’t otherwise be joined. Emotionally competent adult males don’t use either women’s revulsion or women’s bodies in order to establish closeness and cameraderie with each other. And men’s universal capacity to become emotionally competent — at a relatively young age — is very real. The fact that so many choose not to exercise that capacity is not evidence that they lack it.

Men killing women: maternal mortality, heterosexual desire, and the work of male transformation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 30, 2009
in Birth control and contraception, Desire and objectification, Global Feminism, Health Care, Parenting and Science
. 53 Comments

Back to school with much work to be done.

After Friday’s post (immediately below) about male sexuality and its perceived dangers, I got an interesting email from blogger Erin Solaro. She wrote:

The reason male sexuality has been viewed as dangerous and yet at the same time men are supposed to push women has a great deal to do with biology, and no, I don’t mean that men have a higher sex drive than women…

…I mean that 1940 was the first time in America that the mythical average woman’s chance of dying in childbirth dipped below 1 in 100. (For black women, it was higher, about 3 times as high.) In modern Afghanistan, it’s about 1 in 7, which may be pretty close to the historic norm.

Until we understand that, we aren’t really going to understand why we think about men, women and sexuality the way we do.

It’s an interesting point. Any women’s history class must take into account the history of birth-related maternal and infant mortality. While it’s difficult to get accurate historic statistics, the 1 in 7 figure that Solaro cites for contemporary Afghanistan is probably lower than it was in many other time periods. It is generally assumed that until the 20th century, childbirth was the leading cause of death for all women of childbearing years; in some societies that maternal mortality rate may have reached 40%, while other medical historians prefer a lower figure of 1 in 4 or 1 in 5. Given that many women in the developing world still have half a dozen children or more, as they did in previous centuries, the overall risk is compounded by the sheer number of pregnancies carried to term.

Our cultural memory of this devastating toll is limited. We have a Mother’s Day, of course, but we have no public rituals to honor our countless female ancestors who died — quite literally — so that we could live. There is no Tomb of the Unknown Mother in Arlington, though more American women died from childbirth than male soldiers did in war for the first century and a half of our republic’s history. This legacy lives on best in fairy tales, replete with stories of single fathers (Beauty and the Beast) or wicked step-mothers (take your pick). When I ask my students what happened to Cinderella’s birth mother, it drives the point about maternal mortality home.

Whatever the exact figures, childbirth has probably killed more women than any other single cause in human history. Until very recently (a miracle two millenia ago in Palestine notwithstanding), the only possible cause for pregnancy was heterosexual intercourse. So if childbirth kills women, and sex causes pregnancy, then by the logical transitive property, heterosexual intercourse has been, not so indirectly, the most lethal of all human activities for one-half of the population. To put it even more bluntly, men have killed far more women by ejaculating inside of them than they have by any other method. Semen has killed more people than any other body fluid (and yet it is menstrual blood that is considered far more “unclean” in many Western traditions.) (This, by the way, is a good moment to note how absurd the argument is about AIDS being “God’s punishment for homosexuality.” Even if we were to assume that AIDS was primarily transmitted through same-sex sexual activity, the number of deaths globally from AIDS has not yet risen to the historic levels of those from childbirth. If God punishes by death those who engage in forbidden sexual activity, how then to explain that the leading cause of death for women for centuries was having intercourse with their own husbands?)

Very few, if any, men ever presumably sought to kill their wives or lovers through intercourse. But men did devise patriarchal power structures that forbade women from using contraception or from refusing sex to their husbands. From both a moral and a statistical standpoint, cultures that don’t allow women access to contraception — as well as the right to say “no” after marriage as well as before — are complicit in the death of countless millions of women. Of course, many women surely enjoyed sex despite the risks; many women surely longed for children even in the face of the grave dangers that attended pregnancy, labor, and delivery. All the more reason to honor the bravery and the sacrifice of those who fought for life against death on a battlefield far more lethal than those on which their husbands, fathers, and brothers struggled. Continue reading ‘Men killing women: maternal mortality, heterosexual desire, and the work of male transformation’

Lot’s daughters, and ours: on sexualization, feminism, and the absence of agency

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 15, 2009
in Desire and objectification, Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Teaching
. 43 Comments

For the first time in three years, I’m teaching my humanities course on “The Dysfunctional Family and the Western Tradition.” (More about that course here.) We use the work of John Bradshaw as a tool with which to interpret four great masterpieces: the book of Genesis; Euripides’ “Medea”, Ibsen’s “Doll’s House”, and Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” I’ve been teaching the course periodically for over a decade, and it’s one of my favorite classes to offer.

Yesterday, we talked about Genesis 19; the famous story of the destruction of Sodom — and of Lot and his daughters. Since the last time I taught the course, I’ve read Robert Polhemus’ dazzling (if occasionally exasperating) Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority. Polhemus’ book covers not only the story of how the incestuous relationship between these young women and their father has been interpreted within the Abrahamic traditions for millenia, but he touches on some of the ways in which non-incestuous older men/younger women relationships in popular lore mirror the Lot story. (The book is already dated, focusing as it does near the end heavily on the Hillary-Bill-Monica triangle that was so fascinating in the late ’90s; the biblical parallels are there, but to my students who were barely into elementary school at the time, the story doesn’t resonate.) In any case, I recommend Lot’s Daughters with enthusiasm.

The outline of the story ought to be familiar: Lot, Abraham’s relative, offers hospitality to two angels who come to his hometown of Sodom. A crowd of locals besieges Lot’s house, demanding the opportunity to rape the (male) angels. Lot tries to calm the crowd by offering his two virgin daughters instead, but the crowd isn’t interested; Lot ends up being pulled back inside the house. The city is soon destroyed by God, with only Lot and his family permitted to escape; Lot’s wife (the women, of course, are unnamed) makes the fatal mistake of looking back at her burning hometown — and is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and his daughters end up taking refuge in a cave, where the girls decide to get their father drunk and have sex with him so that he can father their children. The eldest daughter conceives a son who will be the first of the Moabites, the people from whom the great figure Ruth comes. Since Ruth is an ancestor of David, and David an ancestor of Jesus, Christ himself is (if we accept Matthew’s lineage) a descendent of a line begun in father-daughter incest.

We all have a question, reading this story: why do the daughters do it? From a feminist standpoint, it’s a perverse twisting of the reality of incestuous abuse; the literature on the subject reveals that parent-child incest is, in reality, always initiated by the former. The victims are turned into the victimizers, and the male authority figure is absolved (through his drunkenness) of responsibility. Read literally, it’s infuriating in its familiarity; heck, it even fits in as an early example of the “myth of male weakness” against which we’ve so often railed on this blog. Lot gets to pass on his line, and he gets to do so with young, nubile women rather than with his barren wife. (Salt, strewn in fields, destroys fertility — you don’t need to be a graduate student in English to figure out that turning a pillar of salt is a metaphor for the undesirability and absent fecundity of ageing women.) Lot gets to start this blessed line –one that will include Ruth, David, and Jesus — through a sexual act for which he was not responsible. In Genesis 9, Noah curses his son Ham for catching his father drunk and naked and exposing the secret; ten chapters later, Lot remains silent when his daughters get him drunk and naked. (Polhemus has a fascinating section in which he details the ways in which centuries of Christian and Jewish theologians devised ways to absolve Lot of what ought to have been a profound sin).

But here’s the angle Polhemus doesn’t touch on, and one we did explore yesterday in class. The first we learn of Lot’s daughters is when their father offers them up to be raped by a mob. Lot wants to use the sexuality of his own children as a bargaining chip in order to protect the men who are his guests. Read in modern terms, Lot is doing what older men (sometimes fathers, often not) continue to do to adolescent girls: reduce their worth down to one thing. Their value lies solely in their desirability, in their imagined purity, in their youthful fuckability. Scripture doesn’t tell us what the girls thought when they heard their father offer them up to the crowd, but it’s not hard to see the impact on their lives. From a feminist and a family systems standpoint, we can’t understand why the girls seduce their father until we understand the impact of his earlier betrayal upon them.. Continue reading ‘Lot’s daughters, and ours: on sexualization, feminism, and the absence of agency’

“Men are simple, women are complicated”: another corollary to the myth of male weakness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 14, 2009
in Desire and objectification, Myth of Male Weakness and Science
. 43 Comments

Below last week’s post on toplessness, Brian takes issue with my suggestion that men are capable of empathizing with women’s nearly-universal experience of being objectified. He writes:

Dialogue between the starving and the force-fed ain’t easy; even establishing a common frame is hard; nevermind agreeing on whether something looks tasty.

It should be easy enough to see terms aren’t used the same way. It comes up often enough that men can’t readily distinguish between objectifying and finding aesthetically appealling. (I know I can’t). Lack of a frame of reference.

The “force-fed and the starving” image refers to the experience of most men (who never feel themselves as objects of desire) and many women (who are objectified and ogled for much of their lives.) It’s an offensive analogy, because it suggests comparable injury between never being wanted and being harassed on a daily basis; the subtext is that women should even feel grateful for the attention they receive, and think sympathetically of men who never know what it is like to be whistled at. Given that we live in a world where a large number of men sexually assault women and use their own desire (inflamed by a woman’s choice of clothing, or behavior, or something similar) as an excuse, it’s silly to suggest any equivalence whatsoever. (Note that I am not unsympathetic to men’s lack of experience of feeling desired; see this post.)

Besides the problem of false equivalence in Brian’s remark, there’s a corollary to the “myth of male weakness” in what he writes. The myth of male weakness suggests that all men are cavemen; brutish and hyper-sexual, our civility is a thin veneer that can drop at any time. Driven by the irresistible forces of the Y chromosome and testosterone, we are to be applauded (so say the peddlers of the myth) for even the most half-hearted efforts at self-restraint. Because of our inherent vulnerability to temptation and our concomitant single-mindedness, the myth suggests it is women’s job to protect us from ourselves. Women need to cover up so as not to distract us; women need to flatter and cajole us rather than ask us directly for what they want; women, in other words, need to treat men like potentially dangerous but nonetheless loveable overgrown infants rather than as full and complete equals. And of course, while this sounds demeaning to men, the real pain of the myth is born by women — who are held responsible for men’s inability to exercise self-control. (This is a good place to recommend, again, Martha McCaughey’s magisterial corrective to all the bad evolutionary biology in the popular media, The Caveman Mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the Debates Over Sex, Violence, and Science.)

Brian’s corollary is a familiar one: men are too simple-minded to understand women, who are infinitely more complex. The “men are simple, women are complicated” myth works to serve the interests of a sexist status quo. The myth excuses men for being uninterested in women’s inner lives and inattentive to women’s concerns; it suggests that a man trying to understand a woman is like having a toddler try to grasp advanced mathematics — taught in Finnish. It is not flattery to tell women that their inner lives are infinitely more rich and nuanced than those of men. It’s part of a very clear agenda to tell women that asking men to “get” them is an unreasonable and bootless request. It may be the soft bigotry of low expectations in a new form, but the real victims are women, who are urged not to expect too much. And the beneficiaries, whether they realize it or not, are most men, who are excused the challenging but certainly not impossible task of listening to women, developing empathy, and remembering what it is that they have heard. Continue reading ‘“Men are simple, women are complicated”: another corollary to the myth of male weakness’

Lust is not the problem; misappropriation is: a reply to Lady J

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 10, 2009
in Christianity, Desire and objectification, Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Masturbation and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 11 Comments

Below last Saturday’s reprint of an old post on sexuality and the distinction between self-honoring and selfishness, Lady J asks:

I still have questions about lust and masturbation and am curious about your thoughts on the matter.

In your post “Some Very Long Thoughts On Fantasy and Masturbation” you state that “Jesus continues the theme in Matthew 5:28: But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. It’s difficult to look at Scripture and continue to insist that masturbatory fantasy is harmless!”

So, what kind of fantasy is NOT harmless? Is there any? And if there is not then would that suggest that masturbation is not appropriate?

I will disclose that my fantasies consist of scenarios that are very loving and respectful. I need that even in my fantasy life. But isn’t that still lust?

Good questions, and I’ll try and answer below the fold. Continue reading ‘Lust is not the problem; misappropriation is: a reply to Lady J’

Legal and topless: on myths of male weakness, and the virtues of feminist legislation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 09, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification, Feminism, Modesty and Myth of Male Weakness
. 64 Comments

A reader named Tracy sent me a link to this Meghan Pleitcha piece that originally ran on Nerve and was then reprinted at Alternet: What Happened When I Legally Exposed My Breasts in Public. This summer, Pleitcha took advantage of a New York state law that permits “gender equity” when it comes to baring chests in certain public settings; she sunbathed topless in Central Park, and wrote about the reactions she got from men, from women, and from her inner voice. It’s a thoughtful piece, and Tracy wanted to know my thoughts on female public toplessness and how that issue connects to the “myth of male weakness” about which I have written so often.

I’ve got a whole category of posts about modesty, and the ways in which our fears about uncontrollable male sexual desire result in our shifting the responsibility for self-control from men to women. I don’t want to keep rehashing points made over and over again, so let me offer just a few links:

In this post, we looked at the word kosmios (the koine Greek term, translated as modesty in the New Testament) and how it has nothing to do with showing skin, but instead refers to refraining from lavish displays of wealth.

In this post, the “argument from testosterone” is considered and rejected.

And I posted about breasts and the notion that men can’t help but stare here.

Though some might not regard the right to bear one’s breasts in public as the single most pressing issue on the feminist agenda, I do support the expansion of the already-extant New York law mandating gender equity when it comes to the exposure of the human chest. What “must be concealed” is a societal variable which has evolved over time. As we read in the news this week, Sudan canes women for wearing pants (something for which women were arrested in this country little more than a century ago.) In some societies, women’s hair has tremendous erotic value, perhaps as much as breasts themselves; in many cultures, concealing the top of the head is mandatory. And as anyone who has watched National Geographic specials or spent time on the beaches of Europe knows, the idea that female breasts are universally arousing to men is silly — what we find arousing is almost entirely culturally conditioned, and has far less to do with our hard-wiring than the peddlers of pop-evolutionary biology would have us believe. For reasons of fairness, as well as for the reason that the male lack of self-control is a construct rather than an immutable truth, it makes good sense to change our laws to permit women to go shirtless in public. Continue reading ‘Legal and topless: on myths of male weakness, and the virtues of feminist legislation’

I Really Like Big Guys: “More to Love” and the desire to feel small

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 01, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification and Mass media
. 46 Comments

I wrote about More to Love, the Fox reality show, just over a month ago. One theme in more recent episodes (h/t Jenn Pozner) is that many of the plus-sized women on the show are attracted to large men who make them feel “small” and, presumably, more feminine. I wrote about that subject on November 29, 2006, and that post appears below.

I was talking to a female friend of mine yesterday; she’s just started dating a new fella, and the budding relationship appears promising. My friend is about 5′8″, and her new boyfriend is 6′5″. I knew her last boyfriend, who was her height — and so, as we chatted, I asked her if the height differential in this current relationship made a difference.

“Yes, I suppose it really does”, she said. “Being with a man so much taller and bigger makes me feel smaller, more feminine. Being in his arms feels wonderful because I feel the difference between us so much more than with Jack (her ex).”

My friend, who knows I teach feminism, asked “Do you think that makes me less of a feminist, wanting a man who can wrap me up and make me feel so feminine and protected?”

Almost from the start of 2006, the broad feminist blogosphere has been engaged in an intense period of self-criticism, culminating in October’s infamous “waxing wars.” I have no interest in reviving a lot of talk about feminist credentials. But my friend’s sense of delight in the size differential between her and her new guy — and her mild discomfort at what that delight might symbolize — is worth a post.

Of course, y’all know I’m going to share the inevitable personal anecdote. In college, I had a huge crush on a gal who lived in the same co-op as I did. She was my height (6′1″) and a broad-shouldered swimmer who had started her college career on an athletic scholarship but who had tired of the intensity of the competition. She was the consummate jock, and if I could be said to have a “type”, it was always the very athletic, tomboyish women. “Lisa” and I tried a romantic relationship, but it ended quickly; my interest in being more than friends exceeeded hers.

Lisa told me, even before we started dating, that she had doubts about our chances together: “I really like big guys”, she said; “I’m a tall strong girl and I like being with a man who makes me feel petite and feminine.” She liked dating tall linemen, and I was going through one of my “skinny stages”. I was already taking women’s studies classes at that point, and in order to make my case, I quite shamelessly used what I thought were sincere feminist tactics, saying something like:

“Lisa, you only want a stronger, bigger man, because you’ve been brainwashed by a sexist culture. You’ve been taught to be uncomfortable with yourself as a tall athletic woman, and so you want to be with an even bigger guy who can make you feel more traditional. You’re surrendering to the patriarchy!”

There might have been one or two grains of truth in what I was saying, but it was evident to both of us that my exhortation was colored less by a commitment to feminist principle and more by naked self-interest. And I had no reply when Lisa told me off, saying (and this I remember more vividly than my own words):

“Don’t be an asshole and assume that what I want stems from my oppression as a woman. If you were a real feminist man you would never try and channel my feelings and desires to serve your needs, and you’d never try and use feminism to guilt me into being with you.”

That was an uncomfortable “aha” moment, and it taught me an enduring lesson. Few things are more indefensible and pathetic than a self-proclaimed male feminist using the rhetoric of gender justice to try and “get” a woman to be attracted to him. Been there, did that, grew out of it. Continue reading ‘I Really Like Big Guys: “More to Love” and the desire to feel small’

“More to Love” and the tentative broadening of male heterosexual desire

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 29, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification and Mass media
. 56 Comments

I hadn’t heard about the new Fox reality show, More to Love, until the beginning of the week, when a couple of students in my women’s history class asked me if I had any thoughts about it. I looked up the previews online, and read Samhita’s pre-show analysis at Feministing yesterday. Reluctantly, but in the vague hope that I might be pleasantly surprised, I watched the show last night.

Designed, as Fox claims, to be an “inspirational new series”, More to Love follows a 26 year-old former offensive lineman named Luke (whom we are reminded at every opportunity weighs over 300 pounds) as he chooses a mate from a group of heavy young women (ranging in age from early twenties to early thirties). It was painful to watch. The set-ups were of the sort familiar to anyone who has watched reality television, but the insecurity of so many of the young women involved was all too real. And that’s what was so monstrously infuriating to me; rather than being inspirational, More to Love simply disguised its cruelty behind a guise of compassion; exploitation masqueraded as empathy. The very real low self-esteem of at least some of the women involved was carefully emphasized, reinforcing the idea that a woman whose body mass exceeds the ideal has no real right to either happiness or self-confidence save that that might be bestowed through great good fortune and the magic of Fox television.

But not everyone judged the show as harshly. Kate Harding, a noted activist for fat acceptance, remarks that the show “does little to dispel the myth that fat people’s lives are built around dessert and desperation.” On the other hand, she’s encouraged that the show is willing to present heavy women as desirable:

For all the show’s flaws — and they are legion — and for all the obvious issues every show like this raises about the objectification of women, I couldn’t help being a little flabbergasted by seeing a real, live heterosexual man on television repeatedly extolling the hotness of these particular women, one of whom was wearing a dress I’m pretty sure I’ve tried on at Lane Bryant. Even if a portion of the audience is tuning in to point and laugh at the fatties — and let’s be real, they will be — the bachelor in question won’t be laughing with them. “Every girl in this mansion is totally my type,” Luke drools.

There’s plenty of excellent feminist criticism of the show appearing in the blogosphere this week, but what Kate says here resonated with me and helped me to rethink some (by no means all) of my initial response to More to Love. As awful as the format of the program was, Luke wasn’t presented as particularly odd for his stated interest in larger women. His interest was not framed as a fetish to be analyzed or mocked (there was enough mocking of the female contestants to take up much of the program). The show did imply that Luke’s taste was rare, which reinforced the notion that most men don’t find heavier-than-culturally-mandated-ideal women to be particularly desirable. But as Kate writes, the fact that Luke was there at all, unshamed for his stated preference, represents at least a tiny degree of progress.

It is almost impossible to overestimate the degree to which young heterosexual men’s desires are shaped by culture and by their peers. The homosocial principle makes it clear that young males measure their manhood in comparison to other men, whose approval matters more than that of women. In the homosocial equation, dating a thin/pretty/young woman is a way of signaling masculine cachet to other men; dating an older, plainer, or heavier woman will be read by other men as weakness. At its ugliest and most destructive, the culture of what Michael Kimmel calls “Guyland” is a culture in which women’s bodies are trophies to be displayed. If a fellow is genuinely attracted to women who are heavier than what his buddies or his culture declare is most desirable, he faces ridicule as a “chubby chaser” and for lacking the masculine chops to attract someone “hotter” (read = thinner.) If Luke is in any way rare, it is not in his preferences, which I think are quite common — it’s in the confidence that he has to make those desires known. To the extent that he represents the possibility that heterosexual male desire is broader than previously allowed, this is a good thing.

On the other hand, Luke himself is heavy, and I think that largely undercuts the potentially revolutionary aspect of the show. Of course, some heavy men are attracted to heavy women. But how much more radical might it have been to have a leaner man saying, as Luke did, “Every girl in this mansion is totally my type?” There’s an analogy to race here. Films and television programs showed people of the same race kissing years before they showed interracial romances. The “hot slender guy who is attracted to thicker women” barrier is yet uncrossed; a taboo remains in place. While men as well as women suffer from fat-phobia, we already have an extended cultural history of depicting overweight men as desirable. (Think how often, for example, folks tend to say publicly that Bill Clinton looked better when he had more meat on his bones.) What we don’t yet cop to — and what we all would benefit from seeing on television — is that one’s own weight is not in any particular way an indicator of one’s own desires.

In my own life, I’ve never had a particular physical type, having dated (and married) women across the spectrum of weight and height. My wife’s body, like the bodies of so many women, has been transformed by childbearing in the predictable way, a change that hasn’t had the slightest impact on my desire for her. (I ought to note that my own weight has crept up a bit, as the happy obligations of fatherhood have meant less time for working out.) But I’ve certainly sensed undeserved approbation come my way from other men when I’ve been with women who met the cultural ideal for beauty and thinness, and when I’ve been with women who deviated from that absurd standard, I’ve been on the receiving end of homosocial ridicule. I’m not alone in that.

In April 2006, I wrote a post on a similar subject: Men, Women, Homosociality and Weight. An excerpt:

For many American men raised to see women as a yardstick with which to measure their own masculinity quotient, a partner’s weight gain is going to be perceived as a very real threat to their own standing. We all know men who get turned on when they realize that their wives or girlfriends are objects of desire for other men. One key question we need to challenge men with: is your partner’s weight gain really turning you off, or are you worried about how other men are reacting to her as a result? Do you miss being able to use other men’s sexual desire as a crutch to stimulate your own libido?

Men are taught to find “hot” what other men find “hot.” The whole notion of a “trophy girlfriend” is based on the reality that a great many men use female desireability to establish status with other men. And in our current cultural climate where thinness is idealized, a slender partner is almost always going to be worth more than a heavy one. For men who have not yet extricated themselves from homosocial competition, their own self-esteem and sense of intra-male status may decline in direct proportion to their girlfriend’s weight gain.

Let me stress that this is absolutely not women’s problem to solve! My goal is not to make women who gain weight feel bad; protecting a fragile male ego is not a woman’s responsibility. The key thing men need to do is get honest about their own desire to use female desireability to establish status in the eyes of other men. And here’s where pro-feminist men can do a terrific service by challenging one another and holding each other accountable for the ways in which we are tempted to use our wives and girlfriends as trophies.

If Kate is right, there may well be one small redemptive aspect of More to Love. But though I’m heartened to see the potential for a new discussion about the ways in which culture shapes male desire, I’m not sure it’s worth the heartache and the humiliation we witnessed last night.

More on desire, ranking, and body anxiety: some less organized thoughts

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 07, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification and Youth
. 108 Comments

Two posts responding to Monday’s post about men and feeling desired: Feeling Hot or Not by Lynn Gazis-Sax and Wanted Bodies, by David Schraub. (UPDATE: Here’s Sungold’s post as well.) I’m grateful for all the comments here, which I think have been helpful.

Second Update: A response from Figleaf.

I can’t stress enough that nothing I wrote was intended to suggest that it ought to be women’s job to praise men more frequently for their physical desirability. As several of the commenters pointed out, women have good reason to fear significant negative repercussions for vocalizing desire. I don’t think casually subjecting strangers to a lusful gaze is ever a good idea, of course, but it’s important to remind ourselves that the consequences of doing so are generally much more perilous for women. Our narratives about rape, for example, make it clear that the only women who are “true victims” are those who have no sexual agency, who expressed no desire. A woman who makes clear that she’s turned on, or at least drawn to, some aspect of men’s bodies (rather than, say, men’s wit or wealth or charm or kindness) risks being “slut-shamed” — and worse, she risks the suggestion that she’s “asking” to be assaulted. Bottom line: we have a perverse cultural sense that “a horny woman can’t be raped”.

Both men and women are raised around male narratives of desire. Most of us grow up hearing that all men are turned on by similar things. Where we do allow for variation, we break men down (I remember learning this when I was about eleven) into “boob men”, “butt men” and “leg men.” The depressing implication is that the desire is for body parts, not whole people. A “boob man”, or so I was told by older boys in junior high school, “needed” to be with a woman who had large breasts — and it was rational for such a man to make sexual and relationship decisions accordingly. The discourse taught me that not only was male desire intensely strong, it was also unchangeable; a boob man couldn’t overcome his obsession even with the most heroic efforts. Dating an otherwise perfect woman with an A cup was useless, almost unfair.

When I was still in junior high school, older boys taught me to rank girls on various attributes (”face” = 8, “body” = 5, that sort of sad thing.) Homosociality is powerful; as so many generations of boys discover, the real pleasure of these “ranking” conversations lies in two things: the false sense of power over women that the process seems to give, and the sense of male cameraderie that the shared discussion engenders. Part of my journey to justice as an adult man has been unlearning that training to “rank” women; part of my men’s work has been learning how to create bonds with other men without relying on either sports or the objectification of women as homosocial glue. And of course, a big part of the work is doing what I can to call other men out on the “ranking” when I hear it happening. Continue reading ‘More on desire, ranking, and body anxiety: some less organized thoughts’

Of never feeling hot: the missing narrative of desire in the lives of straight men

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 04, 2009
in Body, Desire and objectification, Favorite Posts 2009, Men and Masculinity and Sexuality
. 63 Comments

I’ve been thinking this week about the experience — or lack thereof — of being the object of other’s desire. Two different posts got the wheels turning: Girls, Both Real and Otherwise by Daisy B., and Figleaf’s Unforseen Consequences of Men Believing Themselves Unseen. Both Daisy and Fig, in different ways, talk about alienation from their own bodies, at least as they appear to others (and, in a sense, to themselves). I recommend both posts.

In feminist circles, it’s common to talk about the tremendous damage that objectification does to women of all ages and adolescent girls in particular. Many young women remember a moment (painful, terrifying, or, perhaps less often, full of wonder) when they realized that they were the object of another’s sexual desire. Even more women have memories of being sent the mixed message of how both to entice desire (lessons on how to apply make-up, how to dress “sexy” taught at a young age) and how to avoid appearing either “slutty” or “ugly.” (the distinction, of course, is a shifting and elusive one.) For better or for worse, most young women grow up with a cultural awareness that their generally speaking, women’s bodies (though perhaps not their own) are intensely desirable to boys and men; strategies for managing that desire are much-discussed facets of women’s magazines, the advertising industry, and conversation.

But we don’t have a culture in which many young men grow up with the experience of being seen and wanted, in which young men grow up with the sense that their bodies are desirable and beautiful as well as functional. Our cultural discourse about young men teaches that managing their own (presumably insatiable) sexual desire is the defining task of their adolescence. A “jock discourse” that encourages young men to “score” with as many women as possible and an “abstinence discourse” which encourages young men to restrain themselves heroically have essentially the same perspective: your job as a man is to channel your libido, either into sexual conquests or radical restriction. Both discourses center male desire, just as most discourses aimed at young women teach teenage girls how to gain, manage, and direct that same titanic force. The missing element, of course, is the idea that female desire can be directed towards men in general, and towards their bodies in particular.

There’s some explicitness below the fold. Use your own judgment about proceeding. Continue reading ‘Of never feeling hot: the missing narrative of desire in the lives of straight men’